News: Terminal Velocity Now Available on GOG.com

Playing games in the mid- to late ’90s was an exciting experience. Even more so than now, developers were constantly trying to one-up each other with more and more graphically-impressive games, fancy 3D engines, Gouraud shading and texture mapping. Oddly enough, it was the semi-underground “shareware” scene that was often pushing the technological boundaries of the time ever-onward — it was shareware that gave us Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, for example — and, of course, Terminal Velocity, a rather fun sci-fi shooter that has sadly been mostly forgotten by most people who played it.

Terminal Velocity was developed by Terminal Reality, a team that included Tom Hall, one of the original members of id Software. In it, you get to fly a rather badass aircraft that can hover, fly around the then-impressive 3D landscape, into tunnel networks and blow the crap out of everything in sight. It was a contemporary of the wonderful Descent and bore a number of similarities to Parallax Software’s classic, but the focus was much more on flying around exterior environments rather than claustrophobic tunnel networks.

If you’ve never played Terminal Velocity — or you just want to revisit this now rather ancient-looking relic and enjoy its fuzzy digital soundtrack — you can grab a copy right now from GOG.com, who have updated it to play nice with modern Windows-based computers.